Cancelling a power plant in Mississauga would cost “an awful lot of money,” Ontario’s former head of the civil service testified.

Ontario auditor general Jim McCarter's report revealed that the firm building the Mississauga power plant had a financing contract with a U.S. hedge fund that included a $90 million penalty clause and a 14 per cent interest financing cost.

Premier Kathleen Wynne should stop hiding behind an auditor general’s investigation and reveal the costs of scrapping an Oakville power plant before the 2011 election, opposition parties said Thursday.

The push intensified Tuesday as the government repeatedly refused to give a full accounting after Auditor General Jim McCarter revealed the tab for axing a smaller plan in Mississauga was $275 million — 45 per cent higher than the Liberals claimed.

Wynne and Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli said they will wait until the auditor’s office finishes a report on the Oakville move — which the government has said cost $40 million — by September.

“It is simply not true that I have avoided, or that our government has avoided, getting the information out,” the premier said in the legislature.

“What we need is the information . . . that is compiled by the experts.”

Challenging the Liberals to copy the auditor’s Mississauga methodology, Progressive Conservative MPP and energy critic Vic Fedeli said figures revealed by the Ontario Power Authority last fall suggest scrapping Oakville and moving the plant to Napanee could skyrocket to $991 million.

“Come clean, show us the number, tell us who ordered the cover-up and this will be all over,” Fedeli said.

The government is wasting time by “punting it off” to the auditor, charged NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.

Meanwhile, the former head of the civil service and an OPA vice-president of communications told a legislative committee probing the power plant scandal that the government should have known closure costs were going to be higher than claimed.

Shelly Jamieson, cabinet secretary until December 2011, said there were “buckets of costs” for things like natural gas shipments and extra transmission lines beyond the $40 million Oakville figure.

The OPA’s Kristin Jenkins said she doesn’t know what the full tab on Oakville will be because engineering details are being finalized, but testified “there will be additional costs that have to be taken into account” in moving the plant to eastern Ontario.

Jenkins added she does not know why Energy Ministry bureaucrat Jesse Kulendran, a former Liberal staffer, recently denied ordering the OPA to withhold documents from MPPs probing the plant cancellations.

“Ms. Kulendran gave us instructions on how to screen the documents,” Jenkins said, only to learn later that “the approach Ms. Kulendran had told us to use was not in fact what the ministry had been using.”

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